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Wiley, the Godfather of grime, the man whose latest album saw him return to reclaim the genre that he helped to invent, will release his autobiography on November 2. When he sat down with NME for his cover interview back in January, he reflected on the renewed successes of UK rap. “I’m so happy grime’s come back ’round,” he said. “Those guys are doing things we never did. Stormzy is having meetings with the people from The Brits. None of us ever did anything like that back in the day.”
He’s clearly been feeling reflective, as his autobiography, Eskiboy, takes us right back to the start, when he was making grime alongside fellow pioneer Dizzee Rascal in east London in the early noughties. In this exclusive extract, taken from two chapters of the book, he explores his roots in pirate radio and recounts a notorious incident involving Dizzee and the currently incarcerated rapper Crazy Titch.
29. Deja Vu
“Pirate radio has been a part of anything that’s ever come out of England – garage, hardcore, jungle, drum and bass, everything. It was the phone-ins that let me know that it wasn’t just a bit of fun. People would ring up and be like, ‘Yes, Wiley, you’re killing it!’ or ‘Big up Blah-Blah from Blah-Blah!’ and I knew then that we were making a culture.
I’ve been on pirate radio since I was fourteen. It’s the reason I’m Wiley. We were never gonna get a set on Radio 1 or whatever, so we built a fan base ourselves. And it was illegal, you could get arrested and all that, but it was our blessing. You could get charges just for being on a rooftop, but it was our only chance to grasp at. To be honest, it was better than the other stuff we could have been getting up to.
We were always hiding, ducking around, couldn’t tell no one where the studio was. It all had to be kept a secret. And it was that element of it that kept it all going. That…
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